Walter Mosley_Leonid McGill_01 (2 page)

 

 

 

STOMPING DOWN THE two flights to the street, I was thinking about when I would have pushed harder to get past that girl. All I had to do was get a look at Roger Brown. I had never even seen a photograph of the man but I knew he was black and in his thirties with a small crescent scar under his right eye. All I needed was one look.

At an earlier point in my career I would have probably done something extreme to achieve that simple goal. I might have raised my voice and demanded to see her supervisor, or just walked past her, looking into offices until Roger Brown showed his face, or not. I could have pulled the fire alarm in the hallway or even put a smoke bomb in a trash can. But those days were pretty much over for me. I hadn’t given up on being a private detective; that was all I knew. I still took incriminating photographs and located people who didn’t necessarily want to be found. I exposed frauds and cheats without feeling much guilt.

In other words, I still plied my trade but now I worried about things.

In the years before, I had no problem bringing people down, even framing them with false evidence if that’s what the client paid for. I didn’t mind sending an innocent man, or woman, to prison because I didn’t believe in innocence—and virtue didn’t pay the bills. That was before my past caught up with me and died, spitting blood and curses on the rug.

 

 

 

I STILL HAD a family that looked to me for their sustenance. My wife didn’t love me and two out of three grown and nearly grown children were not of my blood. But none of that mattered. I had a job to do, and more than one debt to pay.

So I had contracted to find four men. I’d already located three of them. One was dead, one in prison, and the third was awaiting trial. Of the four, only Roger Brown, if this was indeed the Roger Brown I was looking for, had made some kind of life for himself, the kind of life where a pretty young white girl protected his privacy and called him Mister in an office of first names.

Maybe I went easy on Juliet because I was worried about Roger. The job was presented as a straightforward case, with no criminal prosecution involved. But if you find three bad apples, you know there’s got to be something rotten somewhere.

I walked down Madison in the bright summer sunshine, hoping that this Roger wasn’t the Roger I was looking for; and even if he was, I would have been happy if he never called.

F
rom the Sixties on the East Side of Manhattan I took a yellow cab down to Thirty-fourth Street, a little west of Penn Station. Gordo’s Gym took up the entire fifth floor of a dirty brick building that was built sometime before Joe Louis knocked out the Cinderella Man. At noon on a Wednesday the ring was empty, as most of Gordo’s hopefuls were out plying day jobs to pay for their protein and locker space.

I set myself up in the corner where a heavy bag hung. That particular piece of real estate was next to a big window that was painted shut and so murky that you couldn’t see a thing through it. But I didn’t go to Gordo’s Gym three days a week for the view or the smell of men’s sweat, or for the company, for that matter.

I stripped down right there, put on my thick leather gloves (which were also older than Juliet), and started in on a rhythm of violence that kept up my balance in the rotted infrastructure of my city and my life.

Throwing a punch is the yang of a boxer’s life. The yin is being able to avoid getting hit. I’m pretty good at the yang part. Everybody knows but few can exploit the fact that a good punch comes first from the foot, moves in circular motion around the hips, and only then connects with the arm, fist, and if you’re lucky, your opponent’s jaw or rib cage. Fighting therefore is like the dance of a mighty Scot stamping and swinging in a dewy Highland morning.

For nearly twenty minutes I did my barbarian dance, punishing the big bag, allowing it to swing forward and hit me in the chest now and again. Since I’d given up smoking my wind was getting longer.

I needed anaerobic exercise to vent my anger.

I hated Roger Brown and Juliet along with so many things I had done over the years. At one time I had been able to live with myself because I could say that I only set up people who were already crooked, guilty of something—usually something bad—but not any longer.

I hit that bag with dozens of deadly combinations but in the end I was the one who was defeated, crouched over with my gloves on my knees.

“Not half bad,” a man said, his voice raspy and familiar.

“Hey, Gordo.” I didn’t raise my head because I didn’t have the strength.

“You still know how to give it yer all when you decide to give.”

“And even with that I come up short nine times out of ten.”

“You shoulda been a boxer,” one of New York’s unsung master trainers said to me.

“I liked late nights and cheap wine too much.”

“Beard like you got belongs in the ring.”

I’m a clean-shaven guy. Gordo was complimenting the iron in my jaw.

“Hit me enough,” I said, “and I’d go down like all the rest.”

“You coulda cleaned the clock of every light heavy in 1989.”

“Somebody woulda beat me.”

“That somebody was you,” Gordo said with emphasis. “You hung back when you coulda stood tall.”

“Lucky for the world that I’m a short man in inches and stature.”

I straightened up and turned to face my best friend and toughest critic.

Gordo was a short guy too, somewhere between seventy-five and eighty-eight. He was black by American racial terminology but in actuality he was more the color of untanned leather informed by a lifetime’s worth of calluses, hard knocks, and hollering. The blood had risen to his face so often that his mug had darkened into a kind of permanent rage-color.

I was still breathing hard. After all, I’m past fifty.

“Why you wanna put yourself down like that, LT?” the veteran trainer said. “You coulda been sumpin’.”

He wouldn’t have been talking to me if any of his young prospects were in the gym. Gordo hovered over his young boxers like a mama crocodile over her brood.

I slumped down on the floor, letting my wet T-shirt slap against the wall.

“That’s just not me, G. I never could take any kinda order or regimen.”

“You know how to hit that bag three times a week.”

“Is that enough?”

The sour-faced little guy frowned and shook his head, as much in disgust as in answer to my question. He turned away and limped toward his office on the other side of the big, low-ceilinged room.

After five minutes or so I made it back to my feet. I pawed the bag three or four times before my knees and hips got into it. After a minute had passed I was in a kind of frenzy. Before, I had just been angry, now I was desperate.

I think I went to Gordo’s just so that he could kick me in the ass. The foundation of our friendship was the simple fact that he never held back. I was a failure because I wasn’t a boxer—at least in his eyes. He never cared if his boys lost, only if they didn’t try.

I pounded that bag with everything I had. The sweat was streaming down my face and back and thighs. I felt lighter and lighter, stronger and stronger. For a moment there I was throwing punches like a real contender in a title match; the underdog who intended to prove the oddsmakers wrong. Everything fell into place and I wasn’t anything but ready.

And then, in an instant, the feeling slipped away. My legs gave out and I crumpled to the floor. All that I had was spent.

Gordo leaned back in his office chair and glanced out the door in my direction. He saw me lying there and leaned forward again.

Ten minutes later I got to my feet.

Twenty minutes after that I’d showered and gotten dressed. A few guys were in the gym by then. Not boxers but office workers who wanted to feel what it was like to work out next to real athletes.

I was headed for the stairs when Gordo called out to me.

“LT.”

The visitor’s chair in his matchbox office was a boxing stool. I squatted down on that and took a deep breath.

“What’s wrong with you, kid?”

“It’s nuthin’, G. Not a thing.”

“Naw, uh-uh,” the man who knew me as well as anyone said. “For over a year you been comin’ in here hittin’ that bag hard enough and long enough to give a young man cardiac arrest. You wasn’t all that friendly before but now even the smart-asses around here leave you alone. Don’t tell me it’s nuthin’. Uh-uh. It’s sumpin’ and it’s gettin’ worse.”

“I got it under control,” I said.

“Talk to me, Leonid.” Gordo never used my given name. He called me Kid or LT or McGill in everyday banter. But there was no humor in him right then.

“You once told me that you didn’t want to know about what I did to make a living,” I said in a last-ditch attempt to stave him off.

The old man grinned and tapped his forehead with the four fingers of his left hand.

“I got more dirty secrets up here than a slot machine got nickels,” he said. “I didn’t wanna know about your business ’cause I knew that you couldn’t talk about it an’ still come around.”

In order to be a good trainer you had to be a teacher, a counselor, a psychologist, and a priest. In order to be a great trainer—add to that list, an irrefutable liar.

“You can do it, kid,” the trainer says when his fighter is down on points with his good eye swollen shut.

“He’s gettin’ tired. It’s time to pour it on,” the trainer says when the opponent is grinning and bouncing on his toes in the opposite corner.

Gordo never wanted to hear about my shady doings before. But before ceased to exist and all we had was now.

But I couldn’t tell him the truth. I mean, how could I confess that after twenty years a young woman had found out that I’d framed her father, sending him to prison and ultimately to his death? His daughter called herself Karma, and she framed me for her own murder using seduction and a hired assassin. I killed the killer but still the young woman, Karmen Brown, died in my arms cursing me with spittle and blood on her lips.

Karmen’s last breath was a curse for me.

“Let’s just say that I realized that I’ve done some things wrong,” I said. “I’m tryin’ to backtrack now. Tryin’ to make right what I can.”

Gordo was studying me, giving away nothing of his own thoughts.

“I got a kid tells me that he can be a middleweight,” he said at last. “Problem is he thinks he’s an artist instead of a worker. Comes in here and batters around some of the rejects and thinks that he’s Marvin Hagler or somethin’.”

“Yeah? What’s his name?”

“Punterelle, Jimmy Punterelle. Italian kid. He’ll be in here the next three days. If I put some fifty-year-old warhorse in front of him and point he’ll put on a shit-eatin’ grin and go to town.”

I pretended to consider these words for a moment or two and then said, “Okay.”

It was Gordo’s brief smile that eased my sadness, somewhat. He was my de facto confessor, and Jimmy Punterelle was going to be my Hail Mary.

I
checked my illegal cell phone for messages but Roger Brown hadn’t called. So when I was out on the street again I felt lighter, easier. Maybe everything would be okay. It didn’t matter if my client only found out about three lowlifes. It didn’t matter at all.

 

 

 

I WALKED UP TO Thirty-ninth Street and over to the Tesla Building, between avenues Six and Seven.

“Hello, Mr. McGill,” Warren Oh said in greeting. Warren was one of the daytime weekday guards who stood behind a green-and-white marble podium set under a huge dark-red-and-white plaster mural in the lobby of the most beautiful Art Deco building in the world.

The fresco was of big blocky men and women walking/marching under a Romanesque arch that stood against a tiled azure sky. Some of the people were clothed, others not. They were all white, but I accepted the racial wish-fulfillment of the thirties.

“Hey, Warren,” I hailed. “I haven’t seen you for a while. Where you been?”

“Down home. My mother was sick.”

“How is she now?”

“Fine, fine. Thank you for asking, Mr. McGill.”

“How’s the kids?”

“Doin’ okay, sir. My boy got into technical college, and Mary’s expecting.”

Warren was Jamaican by birth. His mother was a black woman and his father a Chinese descendant of a long line of indentured servants. Warren had a beautiful face and loyal eyes. Every time I saw him I thought that he would make a great con man. You almost had to trust him.

“Ms. Ullman is looking for you, sir,” the copper-colored guard said.

“Oh?”

“Said to ask you to come by her office.”

“She just said to ask me?”

Warren shrugged and I smiled.

 

 

 

MY OFFICE SUITE in the Tesla Building was the apex of my professional life.

The old real estate manager, Terry Swain, had been siphoning money out of the maintenance fund for years. He never took much at any one time but it added up to quite a sum over twenty-six years. When my lease in the Empire State Building was about to lapse, I asked around and found out that Swain was being investigated by the Tesla’s new owners for having stolen one hundred seventy-one thousand dollars. So I did a little research and went to his office on the eighty-first floor.

Terry was tall and thin, sandy-haired even at the age of sixty-one. At fifty-three I’m already three-quarters bald and half the way gray.

“Hello, Mr. Swain, I hear you got some problems,” were my first words to him.

“Not me,” he said with an unconvincing smile.

“No? That’s too bad, because I’m the guy to go to when the hammer is comin’ down and you need to get out of the way.”

My words brought moisture to the man’s eyes, if not hope.